This project will track a representative sample of several hundred Baltimore children through the first two years of school in order to see how social structural factors, (especially the racial and socioeconomic mix of the school and classroom and household composition - solo mother vs. other arrangements), and how social-psychological factors (especially teachers', peers', and parents' performance expectations and parents' ideas of school norms) affect young children's cognitive and socio-emotional development. Structural models of the socialization process designed for use with multi-wave sampling data will be developed and tested. The models will be designed to explain both cognitive outcomes, such as performance in reading and arithemetic, and affective outcomes, such as sense of personal efficacy, self-esteem, academic self-image, expectations for future performance, vocational aspirations, and the like. Furthermore the models will estimate the reciprocal influences of cognitive and affective outcomes. These models will explicitly identify particular sources of influence on children's socialization and estimate their relative strength. Because the sample of children will be divided equally by sex, will span a wide range of socioeconimic levels, and will include blacks as well as whites, the data will shed light on a number of hypotheses about how a child's position in society and social structure affect the socialization process. This project would probe closely how "naturally occurring" events such as household composition affect the cognitive and motivational development of young children over the time when they begin their formal academic careers, a critical and often stressful transition point in the life cycle. By identifying children who negotiate this transition most successfully and comparing them with others who are less successful we may be able to pinpoint the key factors for successful negotiation of the transition. This project would shed considerable light on how social structure affects socioemotional development at a point in life when there is a little firm prior information.